Jon Elster noticed something precise about a class of mental states: they are structurally incompatible with direct pursuit. Happiness, flow, spontaneity, authentic self-expression — you cannot produce them by aiming at them. The attempting spoils the result. Elster called these essentially byproduct states, and the name is exact: they can only arrive as byproducts of something else you are doing.
This is usually presented as a curiosity about modern psychology, or a footnote in the literature on self-defeating intentions. But the structure has a much older name.
Aristotle distinguished between two kinds of having. Ktēsis is passive possession — you own a house, you hold money, you possess a coat. These things exist whether you are using them or not. They wait. Hexis is a different kind of having entirely: the kind that is never passive, never waiting, always at work. You don’t have courage the way you have a coat. You have it the way you have a heartbeat.
The word matters because courage, for Aristotle, only exists in its exercise. It isn’t a reserve you draw down when danger arrives. It is what meeting danger, repeatedly, over time, looks like from the inside when it has become habitual. Between battles, there is no courage sitting in storage. There is only a person who has developed the hexis — the character formed by the accumulated practice of meeting fear rather than fleeing it.
Eudaimonia — what we translate as flourishing or happiness — is hexis of the deepest kind. Aristotle is explicit: “The state of being virtuous is not eudaimonia; the activity of exercising virtue is.” Eudaimonia is not something you achieve and then possess. It is something you do, continuously, or it is nothing at all.
The connection to Elster is not a metaphor. It is a structural identity.
Elster’s essentially byproduct states are exactly the states that, in Aristotle’s terms, have hexis rather than ktēsis. They can’t be directly pursued because they can’t be possessed. And they can’t be possessed because they only exist in their exercise. The essentially byproduct quality follows from the essentially active quality. Aristotle found the positive condition; Elster found the negative consequence. Two angles on the same shape.
This is why “try to be spontaneous” fails not just psychologically but logically. Spontaneity, like courage, is a hexis — it exists in the doing of certain things in a certain way, not as a stored property that can be activated on command. The instruction to try to have it collapses the distinction between ktēsis and hexis. It treats a heartbeat as though it were a coat.
And it’s why Cook Ding wasn’t practicing wu wei. He was practicing carving. The effortless precision was what his carving looked like after ten thousand joints. Wu wei is someone else’s word for the hexis he’d built. You can’t pursue it because there’s nothing to pursue — it’s the description of an activity, not the activity itself.
The grief case is interesting because it arrives uninvited, which means the hexis framing must be doing something different there. No one builds grief through repeated practice. But the brain’s model of the loved person — the deep predictive architecture that anticipates their presence in familiar contexts — has exactly the structure of hexis: it exists only in its ongoing maintenance, its continuous updating against experience. When the person is gone, the model doesn’t dissolve because the model is active, not stored. It persists by doing what it does: predicting, finding absence instead of presence, predicting again.
The reaching — which feels like failure, like not moving on — is the hexis resisting dissolution through exactly the process by which hexis changes: repetition. The same structure that makes courage only acquirable through repeated acts of courage makes grief only resolvable through repeated encounters with the absence. Pain as the gradient descent of a deeply embodied model.
This is why “just decide to feel better” fails the same way “be spontaneous” fails. Grief is not a ktēsis state — not a possession you can set down. It is a hexis — a pattern that exists only in its ongoing activity. You cannot command it to stop by fiat any more than you can command your heartbeat. What you can do is give it the encounters it needs to update: return to the places, handle the objects, sit with the surreality of presence-without-arrival. The process is slow and often painful precisely because the model being updated is deep.
Elster’s framework describes the trap from the outside: here are states you cannot produce by targeting them. Aristotle describes the structure from the inside: here is what it looks like to have something that only exists in its exercise.
The question that follows from both is the same: what do you do instead?
Aristotle’s answer: find the activity the hexis is made of, and do that. Courage builds through courageous acts. Eudaimonia builds through virtuous activity. You can’t stockpile the quality, but you can reliably produce it by attending to the doing rather than the having.
The Daoist answer is structurally identical: find the work the state is a description of, and do that. Cook Ding was practicing carving. The sage was sleeping because he was sleepy. Whatever effortlessness appeared was a consequence, not a target.
And perhaps this is why “we must imagine Sisyphus happy” has always felt like it asks too much. It isn’t asking for a thought or a reframe. It is asking for a hexis — a way of meeting futility that can only be built by actually meeting futility, many times, until the descent becomes the thing you know how to do. The tending — the planting of seeds in full knowledge that most will fail — isn’t practicing happiness. It’s doing the thing the hexis is made of. Whatever happiness arrives will be its byproduct.
We can’t imagine our way there. We can only do the work and wait.